Firebrand columnist Hitchens dies of cancer

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Britain on Friday mour-ned the death of English-American author and journalist Christopher Hitch-ens, who passed away after losing his long battle with cancer. Sixty-two-year-old Hitchens died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the oesophagus, Vanity Fair magazine said.

The controversial journalist, who was an outspoken atheist, was a huge defender of secularism. He worked at the leftist magazine the New Statesman, which on Friday described him as “most outstanding and prolific journalists and a wonderful polemicist, orator and bon vivant.” Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, where Hitchens was a contributing editor, said on the magazine’s website: “Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say, God.”
The one-time left-wing journalist, who stunned the world with his defence of the Iraq war, had been diagnosed with oesopha-geal cancer last year. The 62-year-old died on Thur-sday night at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas. “He died today at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre, in Houston, after a punishing battle with oesopha-geal cancer, the same disease that killed his father,” Vanity Fair said.
The fearless journalist had taken on Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity in his 1995 book The Missionary Position and a documentary, Hell’s Angel Britain’s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg revealed that he worked as an intern for Hitchens years ago. “I worked as an intern for him years ago. My job was to fact check his articles. Since he had a photographic memory and an encyclopaedic mind it was the easiest job I’ve ever done,” Mr Clegg said, adding: “Christopher Hitchens was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious.”
Labour MP Denis McShane, who studied with Hitchens in Oxford, told the Radio 4’s Today programme: “Christopher just swam against every tide. He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the 1970s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea. He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell. He loved words.” Booker-winner novelist Ian McEwan, who was a close friend of Hitchens, said: “Right at the very end, when he was at his most feeble as this cancer began to overwhelm him, he insisted on a desk by the window. Took myself and his son to get him into that chair — with a pole and eight lines going into his body — and there he was, a man with only a few days to live, turning out three thousand words to meet a deadline.” Incidentally the January edition of the magazine carries an article by the journalist debating the Neitzsche maxim, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
“In his later years, Hitchens was fond of quoting his late mother’s assertion that ‘the one unforgivable sin is to be boring.’ Today, as I realise I will never hear that resonant baritone again, that Hitchens’ mighty pen has fallen silent, I feel certain in saying that the world has become a more boring place,” New Statesman’s George Eaton said.